Month: May 2017

(With your permission, we will take a side track from The Clod Wars and take a detour of sorts)

The wife and I had the opportunity to go to Las Vegas last weekend. You know Las Vegas, right? It’s in Nevada and that’s a four hour plane ride from here due west. It’s in the desert which means it is pretty hot most of the time. Anyway…

I went there on business and took the wife with me. We figured on maybe seeing a show and then going to Hoover Dam. Ought to be a fun time.

We stayed in one of them fancy resort motels. There’s lots of them there and they have all kinds of stuff to do. Why, in the main hallway of the fancy hotel we stayed in they had this great big room with all kinds of tables for playing cards and other tables where folks threw dice all across the table for some reason. The game with dice was called craps I think. Then they had these other machines that folks called “one armed bandits.” I don’t know why. Oh, and they had lots and lots of pretty girls all over the place. I don’t know why either. None of them seemed to be playing any games.

Well, we were walking through this big room (you can’t get anywhere in these places without walking through the big game room). and all of a sudden, I felt a stabbing pain in my right rib cage. I looked and there was nothing near my right side except my wife. I asked her what hit me and all she said was “You know.” Well, no, I did not know and said so. She didn’t say a thing as we kept on walking. She wasn’t happy about something or other and it was too close to dinner to start a fight.

I was enjoying the walk through the big game room and all the scenery when, without warning, I suffered yet another stabbing blow to the ribs cage. It was on my left side this time. I looked left and there was my wife and nobody else. “Did you elbow me just then?” I asked. She looked at me with what I would call an ornery face and said, “What do you think?” I told her I had no idea and asked her why she had elbowed me. “Well, if you don’t know, I am sure not going to tell you.” I had no clue what all the fuss was about but, by now, we got to the elevator and to our room. The only time I got elbowed was when we were going through the fancy game room. She never did explain herself. I let the matter drop.

I still don’t know what she was all fired up about.

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Given that we had been run out of “our” territory not once but twice, we were in no mood to hear any guff out of the four meanest girls in the neighborhood. They laughed and laughed until I thought they were going to collapse. When they got back to almost normal (for a girl), they stood up (they had fallen down from laughing so hard) and faced us.

“Ya’ll are ridiculous”, Gail said, stifling yet another laugh. “Yeh, no kidding, Margaret added with a guffaw. “You know they are easy to get rid of, you know that don’t you?” Alice added, “But you all don’t know you have a secret weapon.”

“Secret weapon?” I was incredulous to imagine that these girls would ever stoop to think that we didn’t know about our secret weapon. “Of course, we know about our secret weapon!” Stewi tried to sound smart and all that. Larry had no clue about any secret weapon and said so. (Rule #1 – NEVER admit you don’t know something to a girl-EVER). That just made everything much worse.

Margaret laughed and said, “WE are your secret weapon!” All of us laughed in unison at that out of this world remark. “You! That’s a joke!” I was dead serious even when Larry asked how these girls could be out biggest secret.

“We’ll tell you on the condition that you all have to play four square with us at least two Saturdays a month AND let us use your GI Joe’s with our Barbie.

“NO WAY!!!” We were in complete unison on the matter and there would be no discussion. “OUR GI Joe’s play with YOUR Barbie!? Not on this planet!!” I replied at the top of my voice “You’ve got your Ken doll! Use him.” “GI Joe is much tougher than Ken,” replied Alice. She was right on that for sure but that did not mean they could make our GI Joe play house. He’s a combat soldier and that’s just the way it is. We would not budge.

“Suit yourself,” Alice was unmovable. “Hope you find a new field to play on!”

With that, we gathered up our Moon Pies and RC Colas and left for Stewi’s back yard. No way were we going to agree to Foursquare and loosing our GI Joes.

Next week: A new attempt

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It took quite a spell to get all ten of us into the safety of Stewie’s backyard and the protection of his fence. That fence didn’t help much as our enemies continued throwing clods over the fence and into the yard. We retreated even further into the safety of the garage. That attracted the attention of Stewie’s dad who, upon realizing his back yard was being littered by clods, went out and ran those skunks off. We were, for a time, safe.

It was late Saturday morning by now and we were confined to the interior of the garage with a whole bunch of Saturday to get through yet. Larry went out to scout the area and was met with a merciless shelling of “Panhandle death clods,” as we called them. He was lucky he survived. We were unsure whether we would ever see daylight again until Max had the idea to walk down to Mr. Walker’s store and get an RC Cola™ and a Moon Pie™. We would be safe as Mr. Walker’s store was the opposite direction and further away from the field. Those skunks would leave us alone there. We would be safe out back and could talk over our plans for counterattack.

We forgot about the neighborhood girls.

Here it might be the time to explain the neighborhood girls. They were the bane of our existence. If memory serves, there were about a million of them. Unless we got to our field real early in the morning (btw: my Dad told me it was against Texas state law for girls of any age to be on the field at any time), we had to put up with them and their girly goofiness. Their entire agenda was to entice, invite, or otherwise rope us into playing with them. I’m sorry, but our “Man Code” forbade us from playing house, handling any kind of dolls (G.I. Joe™ was the sole exception), playing some goofy game called foursquare, and anything other than what met our man code. It was just that simple. We were ten years old, for crying out loud! Well, Stewi and Rusty were eight. You get my meaning.

So, on this sunny Saturday morning we went to Mr. Walker’s store, got our RC Colas and Moon Pies, and settled out back of the store to soak our sorrows. (for some of us, It took more than one Moon Pie to drown the sorrow). Mr. Walker even came out to see if we were ok. He went back inside his store and no sooner than the screen door slammed shut than we spotted the four orneriest girls in the neighborhood. Alice, Margaret, Brindley, and Gail came around the corner, stopped dead in their tracks, and stared at us. After what seemed to be an eternity, all four broke down laughing themselves silly. Girls do that you know. Our man code did not allow us to throw clods at girls so we just stood there and stared as meanest of a stare that anyone can muster.

Next week: An unlikely alliance.

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Now that we had a plan, we needed to get things going to take “our land” back. The barbed wire fence that bordered the southern edge of our field ran nigh on to a mile or more. Least wise it seemed that way. The memory of its length is a little fuzzy forty years later. Anyway…We had to figure out how to get on the field, to the fence, and gather up the tumbleweeds we would need while avoiding detection from the “enemy” and (more important) the sorghum bull ( see my entry of March 29, 2016 for an explanation of the sorghum bull). We weren’t too worried about the enemy (they weren’t that smart anyway) but, knowing the sorghum bull was behind us was downright scary. Larry reminded us that the sorghum bull was always gone at dinner time and most weekends. Knowing this, we could plan our time to get started.

Luck was with us that Saturday morning. All ten of us made it to the field and to the fence super early. We were fortunate too that none of the “girls” of the neighborhood were up at that hour. (I’ll explain the neighborhood girls later). All that was great but, what made it greater still is there had been a windstorm over the night and the entire field of tumbleweeds had been caught and snared by the barb-wire fence. Instant fort! Yup, we were lucky!

At this hour of the morning, the sorghum bull would be out and about though we did not see him. Maybe we got even more lucky if he was gone to one of his “shows.” The fellow what owned him showed him off a lot. Maybe we were gonna be lucky again and he would be gone. We assumed he was and went about our business, especially after Larry reminded that he was always gone on the weekends. Life is good!

We entered the field from Stewi’s house which was about a quarter mile or so to the barbed wire fence. As I said earlier, it was now covered with tumbleweeds. You would not find a happier bunch of fellows anywhere on the Texas Panhandle than the ten of us. The day was clear, no ornery ole girls anywhere, and The Almighty Himself had built us a fort.

We got to about ten or twenty feet from the fence and stopped to admire our indestructible fortress. All of a sudden, a sky darkening sea of clods (and a few rocks) flew through the air in our direction. Those same ornery snakes from the other day had snuck into and taken over OUR fort!! How dare they!! We took a terrible “whuppin.”

Oh, we tried our best to fight back but, not only did they attack us from OUR fort, they somehow or other got behind so that we were getting bombarded from the front and rear. There was nothing for it but get back to Stew’s house.